The Search Bar - AI Search Internship

Production AI search.
One intern, real users.

The Search Bar recruits engineers who build production AI and retrieval systems. We're looking for one intern, not a cohort, and we're starting the search close to home: UC San Diego.

Apply now

PaidRemotePart-time

The work

Our internal recruiting platform is a production Rails app built around agentic search: agents that build intelligence about talent and jobs, on top of full-text and vector search over our curated talent pool. We're also rebuilding our own staff's workflows around agents, real AI modernization done end to end on our own team. It has real users who will use what you ship, usually within days.

  1. 01Own one feature end to end as a capstone, and demo it to the team.
  2. 02Ship production code from week one: tested, code-reviewed fixes and features.
  3. 03Work across crawling, enrichment, agentic workflows, UI, and the bug backlog.
  4. 04Interview recruiters who use what you build and turn conversations into specs.

How we work

Mostly remote and asynchronous. A 1:1 with your mentor (our CTO) every other week, code review within a business day, and a daily written check-in you drive yourself. No daily meetings. Everything important is a document: a spec before you build, a plan while you build, and written proof of correctness before and after it ships. A feature if you're self-directed, a dealbreaker if you need someone watching. Self-select accordingly.

You'll also work inside custom-built agentic workflows running on our own private cloud, not off-the-shelf tooling. We think it's ahead of where most companies are, and it's a big part of what makes this internship worth doing.

What you leave with

If it's a good fit, our intention is to help place you with one of our clients to keep building AI search after the internship ends. We can't promise that outcome, but it's what we're pointed at.

  • Merged, tested, code-reviewed production work in your portfolio
  • A capstone feature you spec'd, shipped, and demoed
  • Hands-on AI modernization: agentic search and staff workflows in production
  • Requirements and spec documents you wrote from real user interviews
  • A production-grade practice for building with AI coding agents
  • A CTO reference grounded in months of your actual work

What we're looking for

  • CS major with coursework or projects touching machine learning, information retrieval, and AI search
  • You've built and debugged things beyond class assignments
  • You already use AI coding agents as a real tool, and can explain what they got wrong and how you caught it
  • You write clearly and like working in documents. This is a must.
  • Ruby experience is not required. Fundamentals and curiosity transfer.

Paid, remote, part-time.

We're recruiting around UC San Diego, but there's no on-site requirement. Academic credit is possible if your program supports it. Send a short note about something you've built: what it does, what broke, what you'd do differently, plus a link to code if you have one. No cover letter theater.

Apply now